


Selah

by Cynehild



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 06:06:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cynehild/pseuds/Cynehild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Athelstan in the new world</p>
            </blockquote>





	Selah

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work-in-progress, filling in a few of the gaps around and between the first season of the History Channel 2013 series 'Vikings' as seen from Athelstan's POV. I'm not quite sure where or how it will end, as we've only seen the first six episodes. I'll be adding chapters and sticking as closely to canon as possible - so, any and all explicit or implied relationships in the show may show up here, as well as the various events, including the gory and troublesome ones. I'll change or add to tags as necessary for later chapters.
> 
> ("Selah" is a word that appears at the end of some Bible passages, mostly Psalms, which seems to mean something like 'pause and have a think about what you've just [read, heard, seen]'. Which is what Vikings made me do, and why I started writing this fic.)

On the barbarians’ boat in the middle of the ocean, even the air is icy-wet under a stark grey sky. Is it rain or the spittle of sea-spray? Athelstan doesn’t know: the drops that collect and run down over his lips are salty but he has been crying, on and off, from the moment the dark-haired savage who had wanted to kill him had turned his rage elsewhere and desecrated Christ’s cross on the chapel wall. Even his tears are half-frozen now.

He used to think rising for Lauds in the silence of a pre-dawn midwinter on desolate Lindisfarne was the coldest thing in the world, but that sanctuary and every certainty that went with it has been torn wide open, hurling him into a dark unfathomable chasm, where the knife-edge wind slices into him and wet chill bleeds through his clothes. Athelstan has travelled by sea before, and he knows the cold could kill him and his fellow captives every bit as easily as any of the heathen beasts around them, hunkered down now in their great warm cloaks of fur and leather, huffing over their plunder like contented wolves after a successful hunt.

Athelstan had pulled up the hood of his cowl as soon as possible, for the little protection it offered. Next to him, Cenwulf’s hands are white as bone, clasped and shaking. “Brother, cover your head,” Athelstan whispers, but Cenwulf just crosses himself. “I submit to God’s will in all things,” he murmurs, and Athelstan wants to say _if our Lord wanted you dead, he’d have let these monsters strike you down back there in the scriptorium._ But that’s the kind of irreverent nonsense Father Cuthbert never seems - seemed - to tire of reprimanding him for, so Athelstan clamps his lips together and looks away. 

The barbarian prince is watching him again. Sprawled up in the bow of the boat, arms behind his head, astonishing blue eyes that catch Athelstan’s glance and hold it, while his bearded lips twitch into a grin and he bobs his head, as polite and amiable as brother passing brother monk walking to the refectory on a sunny morning. There’s something in the way he looks - amusement or a kind of focused fascination - that isn’t there in the faces of the other raiders, who mostly ignore the little huddle of monks around the mast-foot. Sometimes one or another will reach out in passing, to touch a tonsured head or poke at arm and calf muscles before pulling back with a scornful insult. It seems most of them don’t think much of their captives’ qualities as slaves. 

Whenever the prince gets up to stretch his legs or take a turn at the oar, he speaks to the men he passes, scraps of praise and encouragement, a shared burst of rasping laughter as he cups their blood-smeared cheeks and admires the gold and jewelled spoils of God’s house now scattered carelessly about at their feet. His voice is surprisingly soft and light. His eyes are everywhere, on his crew, his ship, the red sail fluttering, the grey-on-grey horizon, and every time he catches Athelstan spying on him the prince doesn’t look away, just stares and smirks until Athelstan flinches and twitches his head down again.

***

A night passes. Athelstan doesn’t sleep. In the darkness he clutches his knees and prays, and sometimes between the slap of sail and sea, the ship’s groaning timbers and the sighs and snores of their sleeping captors, he catches fragments of his own prayers echoed in the faint whispers of his brother monks. There’s no way to tell the hours out here but as the faint first grey light spills along the horizon, Brother Osgar nudges his foot and nods towards Gregory and Waldhere, heads together, softly murmuring the first lines of the Creed. None of them dare to speak too loudly, but even in the dimness Athelstan recognises the shapes their lips make, the invisible words unscrolling in the air between them, comforting and familiar. _Haec est fides catholica… which, except a man believe truly and firmly, he cannot be saved._

Around them the barbarians start to wake, grumbling and cursing as they stretch cramped limbs and share out food. To Athelstan’s surprise, the prince himself saunters over to the huddle of monks with water and a few lumps of hard bread. “Wind’s fair,” he says casually, “we should make land tomorrow. Tell them.”

Why? So they know the food can be eaten now, no need to ration themselves, perhaps, Athelstan thinks. Their captor has ambled off again. Brother Cenwulf is asleep, his breaths long and shallow: they put aside crusts and a half-bladder of water for him.

“God’s will be done!” Gregory says, tucking Cenwulf’s scapular over his blanched feet. 

Osgar sighs. “This is indeed God’s will, brothers, as was foretold. Athelstan, you spoke that very night of the prophesied doom! But what grievous sin must have been hidden amongst our number – even in the sanctity of our holy Priory – for His wrath to have been visited upon us all with such severity!”

“Brother, no,” Gregory, ever the peacemaker, shakes his head with a sad smile. “The prophecies were of Divine anger not against men of faith but our whole land, where too many of our great kings and thegns have strayed from the righteous life of late, alas. But this destruction is a warning, surely, not a punishment? For it is not in this world that God takes measure of our sins, but in the next.”

“What you say is true. Else why would He have condemned poor Cenwulf to share our wretched fate?” Waldhere says morosely. Everyone knows Cenwulf is the holiest of all the brethren on Lindisfarne, legendary for his long days of prayer, fasting, scourging. Deprivations that will not have helped him to endure this ordeal, Athelstan thinks. 

“Well,” he says slowly, “at least we are all alive. God has seen fit to spare us for some purpose.”

“Aye, but what?” Waldhere asks. “You understand these monsters – what do they say? What sport will they make of us?”

“No sport, Brother, we are to be sold as slaves.” Athelstan sees the angry shock on Osgar’s face. “Which means we are valuable to them, as much as any treasure on this ship. See, have they not fed us, given us water? Some monasteries have slaves – I’ve seen them at Wearmouth and Malmesbury. It’s a hard life, but honest service, as St Benedict himself has said. It seems that is our fate now.”

“Not my fate!” Osgar snaps. His father had been a wealthy thegn at York, it’s not impossible to imagine his own family had owned one or two slaves. “We’ll reach land the next day, you say? Then I say we look to escape as soon as we get the chance.”

“How? To where?” Waldhere says. “That’s foolish talk. We’ll be in a strange realm, full of pagans – no friends, no money, no idea where to go. Why, only Athelstan among us speaks their barbarian language. Is it hard, Brother? How did you learn it?”

“Five years ago, that winter I spent at the monastery at Tournai. There was an old monk there who’d been a slave in his youth, captured by a Frankish lord fighting raiders from the Northlands. He taught me a little of his language. It’s what these men are speaking, I think.”

“I remember your travels!” Gregory smiles. “Back when Father Leofric was Prior, God rest his soul. He sent you there to exchange books for our library – you brought back that fine _Expositio Psalmorum_ , did you not? Ah, you learned your Greek and Latin so quickly as a boy, he saw your sharp brain! I think he hoped you might choose to go forth one day as a missionary, to take the light of God into the lands of darkness.”

“Maybe that’s why our Lord has set us amongst these heathens?” Waldhere says, and Athelstan nods, shrugging, but his mind is on Leofric, a compassionate and thoughtful man who had urged him at fifteen to see a little of the world outside their monastery, before making the decision to commit the rest of his life to it. 

Gregory was right. The first year, Leofric had sent him with fresh-copied texts from Lindisfarne to York, to be exchanged for new books to add to their own scriptorium, and he’d hated almost every day of the journey, out in a world he barely remembered, that had seemed huge and fearful and full of dirt and ignorance and wickedness. The next year it had been Malmesbury, with its fine school and library and a lively Abbott, fond of a good meal with plenty of ale to fuel the latest arguments about what was appropriate in abstaining for Lent, or the decent length for a prayer. Though it had taken several weeks there and back, with some experience under his belt Athelstan had found his fear giving way to curiosity, even enjoyment of all the new sights and new people to talk to. 

A seasoned traveller by eighteen – at least compared to most of his Lindisfarne brothers - he’d been sent across the sea all the way to Tournai, deep in Frankia, and ended up staying there over a stormy winter. When he finally made his way back to Northumbria the following spring, a sudden wasting sickness had taken Leofric home to God and his successor was Father Cuthbert, who disapproved of the many carnal temptations of the world outside the monastery, and believed that true faith came from contemplation, seclusion, silence and submission. Unlike languages, they hadn’t exactly been Athelstan’s strengths, though for love of Leofric’s memory he had tried hard to obey.

“Well,” Osgar says dryly, “if even Brother Athelstan could stop being distracted long enough to have learned this pagan language, I’m sure the rest of us will be fluent enough to convert them all by the end of the week.”

“It isn’t so –“ Athelstan begins, before a boot jabs him in the side, not gently. It’s the dark-bearded giant who had been so eager to slaughter him back in the chapel. “Be silent, slave!” he snaps, then calls across to the prince who is lounging back in his usual place in the bow. “These strange men, they chatter and gossip like women. Hardly a beard between them. Maybe some of them are women after all,“ – the boot digs into him again, pushing at his clothing – “is that why you spared this little virgin, brother? So she can grind your corn, and open her legs for you when the shield-maiden is tired of your bed-tricks?”

Athelstan risks a look over at the prince, but his face is as smiling and relaxed as ever.

“I didn’t bother to check, brother. Don’t let me stop you, if you’re feeling desperate to scratch that itch. Just remember to keep some of your strength for Kattegat. By the time we get back, you’ll be so rich you might even be able to afford a young, pretty whore this time.”

“With that face like a boar’s arse? You could have the roof of Valhalla to trade with - even old Finna the fishwife wouldn’t touch your little sprat, Rollo!” It’s another of their captors, a blond giant who is somehow even taller than the prince’s scowling brother. He flings his arms around the waist of Athelstan’s persecutor, nuzzling at his neck with a high-pitched giggle. “Oh, sweet rich Rollo, I’ll kiss your arse for that golden cup in your bag!”

The others join in, their voices squealing girlishly. “Rollo, you’re worth ten of the Earl!” “My honour for a lick of your treasure!” “I’ll be a rich man’s wife, choose me!” The two huge men stumble away, laughing and wrestling, and away from all the horseplay the prince stretches like a cat, blinks lazily at Athelstan and the other monks, forgotten once again, before he yawns and settles back to gaze at the sky, where the grey haze is starting to give way to wisps of blue.


End file.
